Re: [ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Fast Blake-256 Cryptographic Coin for CPU/GPU/FPGA
does blakecoin favor asics?
yes but perhaps not how you may think. it is not compatible with bitcoin/sha-256 asics. however, the blake algorithm is very efficient and would be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement in silicon (relative to scrypt for example). there are no asics for blake yet, however i believe there is some documentation available about implementing blake in asic. there is also fpga support for blakecoin, and my understanding is that fpgas are used for prototyping asic designs. so this is good because if blakecoin gains enough momentum to warrant asic production, it will result in extremely high hashrates with very low power draw (much better than possible with sha256 asics). hope that helps
that's about right but with fpga's you do get them in different categories not all are for asic development e.g the lx150 used on the ztex board are designed for industrial/automotive applications and the other lx150 used on the other fpga boards are considered "Low-Cost FPGAs" rather than for asic development which would be more of the mid/high end fpga range.
Quote Xilinx:
"Spartan®-6 FPGA delivers an optimal balance of low risk, low cost, and low power for cost-sensitive applications, now with 42% less power consumption and 12% increased performance over previous generation devices. Spartan-6 FPGAs offer advanced power management technology, up to 150K logic cells, integrated PCI Express® blocks, advanced memory support, 250MHz DSP slices, and 3.2Gbps low-power transceivers."
* Newer fpga's out now with better fmax and lower power due to 28nm-20nm designs, and higher end fpga's from Altera already at 14nm
* Altera used to do a thing called hardcopy (fpga->asic) but they have stopped that http://www.altera.co.uk/devices/asic/asic-index.html
so I like to think of fpga's as re-programmable hardware while asic is optimal for one task only e.g its fixed to one algorithm
some consumer, networking and broadcast equipment use fpga's is production devices same is true in automotive industry here is an example:
http://hackaday.com/2013/05/08/hdmi-color-processing-board-used-as-an-fpga-dev-board-to-mine-bitcoins/
the same fpga's used for mining Bitcoin can be reused for mining Blakecoin so you can see the flexibility that an fpga has over asic
I am quite keen on re purposing equipment for new tasks so might have a soft spot towards fpga's
asic's will always get higher frequency and lower power usage as it is only designed for that one task, only thing left is to shrink the design like we have seen with CPU's over the years
the volume of Blakecoin does not justify the huge cost of asic production/design yet, GPU and fpga mining should be possible for a few years at least
very good explanation bzyzny
